Thought for Today
Psalm 37:25 I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.
Joel 2:28 Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.
Matthew 9:16 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. 17 Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.
Last evening, during our Bible Study, I posed the question, “What kind of technology might we have in a world that promoted nurturing and caring for each other?” I posed that question in contrast to our own world where we promote competition and success.
As I have continued to ponder that question, an old adage keeps popping up in my thoughts, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” When I first heard that adage as a youth, its truth seemed patently obvious to me. Now, as I am far distant from the days of my youth, I wonder whether it is true.
In my youth, only fictional characters traveled in space. Computers were multi-storied buildings filled with vacuum tubes and requiring massive air conditioning to dissipate the heat they generated. Telephones were black, tabletop, rotary dial phones. Only the comic book character Dick Tracey had a wrist phone. When I was a youth, my mother had no cookware made from a material originally created as a heat shield for a space shuttle. Mom got her first microwave oven long after I left home. I learned to drive in a car with massive tailfins and one of the earliest automatic transmissions.
Our family bought our first desktop computer in 1984; “The IBM PCjr (pronounced "PC junior") was a home computer produced and marketed by IBM from March 1984 to May 1985, intended as a lower-cost variant of the IBM PC with hardware capabilities better suited for video games, in order to compete more directly with other home computers such as the Apple II and Commodore 64.” (www.wikiwand.com) Our children both used that computer as did Greta and I for several years. It was a part of numerous Science Fair projects, produced many essays and even assisted in producing some of the first spreadsheets we created. It was the beginning of several generations of desktop computers, each generation more advanced than its predecessors.
Can you teach an old dog new tricks? I no longer work on a computer in fear of seeing smoke waft out of the keyboard or hearing strange noises emanate from the CPU. I even now know that CPU means ‘Central Processing Unit,” and is what lies beneath the keyboard. Greta and I recently upgraded our cellular phones to iPhone 14s, which are capable of doing more computing than that IBM PCjr, and capable of doing much more than those multi-storied computers of long ago.
As a Christian, I have learned to use much of our modern technology in my ministerial pursuits. I daily use a Bible software, now so outdated it is no longer supported by its creator. Those verses above were copied from that software. That software also has the Bible in almost every language spoken as well as in the Greek and Hebrew of the most authoritative sources. I am typing on a laptop computer containing one of the most updated chips.
I don’t have much of an answer to the question I posed last night. I am relatively certain that any technology we might develop in a society promoting nurturing and caring would be of little use in killing each other. I cannot imagine we would have ICBMs, cluster bombs, killer satellites or assault rifles. Might we have GPS? Computers? Cell phones?
I do know that irrespective of technology, our sons and our daughters shall continue to prophesy, our elders shall continue to dream dreams, and our youth shall continue to see visions. Our world and its inhabitants will continue on until we reach the destination our Creator God fixed for our world at its creation. And the words of the psalmist will continue to prove true, “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.”
Stay safe, walk with God, trust God,
Pastor Ray